Seeking a Peaceful Revolution

My piece about anarchism in this section a few months ago was met with a certain amount of irritated disbelief – which is fair enough, really.

Take anarchism as a method of analysis. Basically, it tells you to strip society down to its most basic component: the people in it. You then build any ideas or understanding up from that basic component, that reality of millions of individuals trying to live their lives. This thinking, if taken far enough, leads you to believe that Britain hasn’t been constructed very well…

In short, the whole idea of a nation has come about through a few powerful people’s conquest and dominion built on the suffering or at least suppression of everyone else.

Now, this isn’t very pleasant, and maybe it is pitiful to say so, but I think if you’ve got the resources, either in monetary terms or people willing to work with you to make it happen: get some land, build an eco-home and a farm, and try to have as little to do with our politics and economy as possible.

The eco-home is not for the environment but for you: it minimises your outgoings and even gives you some income if you’re adding electricity to the national grid. If you’re in a town or city and don’t want to leave, it’s a bit more complicated. You can get ecological if you work with the other people in your house or block, but you’ll struggle to grow enough food to cover basic dietary requirements on your own. And in all this you’re still paying council tax.

Still, there are ways, approaching farmers as a bloc or cooperative and trying to make deals to cut out supermarkets. You might go organic because many organic farms are small enough and specific enough in the product they provide to not depend on a supermarket for financial viability.

And if we all start doing this – cutting away the need for this bigger, centralised society to provide for us – we might then decide to take over the local councils and sort out a
few other things like healthcare, education. We’ll have more money individually too, after investment, because our costs will be so much less, and because the whole process involves working with other real, normal people who can support you, i.e. not large or small businesses just trying to get your money. The whole process involves personal profit, not monetary profit – and that’s a matter of focus, not of type. Profiting personally doesn’t mean you can’t have money, it just means you’re looking past the money and at what it buys you, and you’re getting that first. Again you’re looking at the people, not their decorations.

This would be a kind of anarchism: non-threatening, a bit mental – as ever – but ultimately achievable. A peaceful revolution, if you will.

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